1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to picture display and moving picture retrieval on a computer, and more particularly to picture display and moving picture retrieval based on multi-scene reproduction.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A prior common simultaneous multi-scene reproducing method is as exemplified by Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-19731. As shown in FIG. 33, a picture display unit based upon this simultaneous multi-scene reproducing method features a decoding frame identifying means 3301 for identifying a decoding level on the basis of the number of data of moving pictures to be simultaneously displayed for reproduction, an aiming frame decoding means 3302 for decoding picture data at the decoding level identified by the decoding frame identifying means 3301, and a moving picture reproducing means 3303 for separately reproducing each of the decoded picture data.
In addition, a prior moving picture retrieving method is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2-113790. According to this retrieving method, as shown in FIG. 34, provided are a typical scene extracting means 3401 for extracting, as scenes, portions of moving picture information representative of a feature of a retrieval picture, a menu picture producing means 3402 for arranging these scenes on the time axis to edit them as menu pictures, and a menu picture reproducing means 3403 for reproducing the menu pictures for retrieval, which achieves the retrieval of a picture coincident with the retrieving object while seeing the menu pictures.
Moreover, so far, as a method of selecting data answering the purpose from moving picture data accumulated, there has been known a moving picture retrieving system disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-81348. FIG. 35 is a block diagram showing the arrangement of the moving picture retrieving system of Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-81348. In this moving picture retrieving system, a reduced picture producing section 3502 produces picture data for display as a moving picture on the basis of picture data of all or a portion of moving picture data frames and further creates a reduced still picture representative of each of the plurality of moving picture data from a portion of each moving picture data. Further, a still picture display unit 3504 arranges and displays the representative pictures based on the moving picture data on a screen of a bit map display 3506, while a scene selecting means 3507 selects the representative picture on the bit map display so that a moving picture display unit 3505 successively displays moving picture display picture data of the moving picture data represented by the selected representative picture on the bit map display 3506 in order.
However, in the prior art, in the case of the simultaneous multi-scene reproduction, a plurality of reduced scenes are commonly controlled to be respectively allocated to areas defined by dividing the display screen, and for this reason, the control such as decoding is necessary for the allocation (corresponding to the number of moving pictures to be reproduced). In addition, in the case of conducting the simultaneous multi-scene reproduction through a network, there is a need to insure a band of the network corresponding to the moving picture data to be reproduced, and in the case of carrying out the simultaneous multi-scene reproduction within a terminal, the consumption of the system resource occurs by a quantity corresponding to the number of moving pictures to be reproduced.
Furthermore, in the case of the retrieval of moving picture data, since the retrieval object is generally a set of pictures making features of a moving pictures, the retrieval is also performed in terms of similar pictures, with the result that the retrieval efficiency becomes worse and a long processing time is taken.
Still further, there is a problem in that, for designating a retrieval condition from a plurality of terminals and for simultaneously reproducing a plurality of moving pictures different among the respective terminals, in addition to the loads on the terminals and network, the load on the server increases in proportion to the number of terminals to make it difficult to smoothly reproduce moving picture at the plurality of terminals.
Moreover, in the prior method, for finding out the directing scene from the moving picture data being the object of the retrieval, there is a need to reproduce and check the whole moving picture display picture data created in advance, and this retrieval needs to take an extremely long time and much labor.